John thanks for the useful tip, i finally handled creating child portal on godaddy root with your instructions. Thank you very much sir.

Excellent, glad I could help.

In case anyone else needs to do this, here are the instructions for creating a Child Portal on GoDaddy since they do not allow write permissions to the root folder for DNN.

1. Create a subfolder using the child portal name with the GoDaddy hosting control panel.

2. Create the portal in DNN as a parent portal (creating a parent does not require DNN to create a physical folder).

3. After it is created, go in and change the PortalAlias for that portal so it maps it as the subfolder.

Note: Having a portal alias in the form of mysite.com/childfolder is really the only thing that makes it a "child" portal.

4. Then you will need to copy the subhost.aspx file from the /portals/_default folder into your child folder and rename it to default.aspx

Hi,

I just found this thread as the first rank of "dnn portal alias query string" keywords. I also found the asp.net forums that John Mitchell said. However I can't reply in the asp.net thread. So I just reply here.

I wondering this things happened since 2003 by ikamiksok in the asp forum and until today, dnn version 5.1.x also have a same result by default settings.

Here I want to share, using the same way, I just modify it to make it more useful.

Before that I want to tell the interested things in regex to perform url rewriter. Opening and closing bracket "(" and ")" called capturing group used to 'capture' anything inside it so that we can grab the value. In this url rewriter, we use capturing group in LookFor to copy the child portal name to SendTo url, paste by using $number format where number is the capturing group #. Its useful if we have many child portal that is difficult to add in the SiteUrls.config one by one.

This is my problem because I want to make a lot of child portal, each represent as a specific language site, mirror to the main portal. DNN 5.1.x still not 'fully' multi language to the end user including menu caption and text/html content. (I notice that it will be start to implement in 5.2.x).

In a basic use like this:
LookFor > http://www.domain.com/([^/]*)/Default.aspx
SendTo > ~/Default.aspx?alias=www.domain.com/$1

[^/]* means any letters except "/". We should use this instead of .* because it accept any letters including "/" and we want to make sure it is not a child-child folder or even /TabId/123/Default.aspx that is need to pass to the last SiteUrls.config rule for TabId. You can see the () is the place of child portal, it will be copied to $1. Note that I include absolute url from http... instead of */([^/]*)/Default.aspx because we need to consider http://www.domain.com/path1/path2/path3/Default.aspx also is a match.

Simply you can change like this if you consider about https:
LookFor > (?:http://|https://)www.domain.com/([^/]*)/Default.aspx
SendTo > ~/Default.aspx?alias=www.domain.com/$1

Note that (?: ) is non capturing group. So this () will not counting and $1 remain refer to the second (), child portal name.

We are done.

By using this single rule we can map all child portal to its alias query string.


Now in advance way. Sometimes I want to use the DNN site locally and do some testing. So we also need to copy the host url www.domain.com to the SendTo because it can be localhost or 127.0.0.1.

So this is the result:
LookFor > (?:http://|https://)([^/]*)/([^/]*)/Default.aspx
SendTo > ~/Default.aspx?alias=$1/$2

The second and third () is the host name and child portal name will be copied to $1 and $2 respectively. You can replace second () host name by checking valid url regex. I think it is not important and will make url rewriter more work, just make sure there is no "/" in the host url.

Another problem, normally in localhost we are not using the site in default website (http://localhost/) instead we put it in virtual directory so that more than site can be testing in the local (http://localhost/DNNSite). So we need to add exception for localhost with virtual directory. As a result ([^/]*) will become (localhost/[^/]*|127.0.0.1/[^/]*|[^/]*). It will tell url rewriter to check for localhost/[^/]* first then 127.0.0.1/[^/]* and lastly [^/]*.

The end result is:
LookFor > (?:http://|https://)(localhost/[^/]*|127.0.0.1/[^/]*|[^/]*)/([^/]*)/Default.aspx
SendTo > ~/Default.aspx?alias=$1/$2

By using this single rule we can map any host including:
http://www.domain.com/de/ to http://www.domain.com/Default.aspx?alias=www.domain.com/de
http://www.domain.com/fr/ to http://www.domain.com/Default.aspx?alias=www.domain.com/fr
https://www.domain.com/fr/ to https://www.domain.com/Default.aspx?alias=www.domain.com/fr
http://localhost/DNNProject/fr/ to http://localhost/DNNProject/Default.aspx?alias=localhost/DNNProject/fr
http://127.0.0.1/DNNProject/fr/ to http://127.0.0.1/DNNProject/Default.aspx?alias=127.0.0.1/DNNProject/fr
as well as http://www.domain.com:8080/jp/ to http://www.domain.com:8080/Default.aspx?alias=www.domain.com/jp (not tested but sure)

However this is complex rule and the performance affected is higher because each page loading need to perform the regex match this rule and the others. If you consider for performance then you need to do something with Default.aspx inside each child portal folders which is responsible to redirect the url to main portal ~/Default.aspx?alias=.

CallMeLaNN